In a first for Toronto’s St. Augustine’s Seminary, students, faculty and friends came together recently to celebrate four Catholic authors who happen to also be St. Augustine’s professors. Celebrating Catholic authors, Catholic books and Catholic publishing is important, said Toronto Auxiliary Bishop Wayne Kirkpatrick because books build Catholic culture and add to a legacy of faith.

As Americans learned how Washington was realigned by the Nov. 6 mid-term elections, the elder statesman of the American civil rights movement was in Toronto calling President Donald Trump “an icon of chaos” and urging Canadians to resist “plantation capitalism” being pushed by American nationalists.

TRIESTE, Italy – As Catholics continue to debate pastoral and doctrinal approaches to marriage, they should remember that the Catholic approach to marriage and the Eucharist has a direct impact on what the Church teaches about society as a whole, an expert on the Church’s social teaching has said.

Two recent films, Deepwater Horizon starring Mark Wahlberg and Sully starring Tom Hanks, represent something of a breath of fresh air. Both movies feature men who are intelligent, virtuous and quietly heroic. If this strikes you as a banal observation, that just means you haven’t been following much of the popular culture for the past 20 years.

TORONTO - We have the technology to extend life beyond its natural limits, so why not apply our technological resources to end a life when natural death eludes us? Why not take full responsibility for the control humans already exercise over life?

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico - Pope Francis urged society to rethink its ideas of locking up inmates and throwing away the key, calling such an approach another symptom of the "throwaway culture" he often decries and "a symptom of a culture that has stopped supporting life, of a society that has abandoned its children."

Everyone longs to know something that’s secret, to know something that others don’t know, but that you know, and the knowledge of which gives you some insight and advantage over others who are outside the inner circle of that secret. It has always been so. Historically this is called “Gnosticism,” which forever makes an appearance in one form or another.

VATICAN CITY - The presidents of the bishops' conferences of Germany, France and Switzerland decided their preparation for the Synod of Bishops on the family could benefit from listening to theologians, biblical scholars and canon lawyers from all three countries, said the spokesman for the German bishops.